In a variety of industries, information is created and distributed as an adjunct to sales of related products and services. For example, in the financial industry (e.g.—stock markets, money markets, etc.) a variety of information (“content”) is produced, such as research reports, news summaries, market commentaries, etc., by the market participants selling financial instruments and is distributed to market participants that might trade in those associated financial instruments. Presently, interactions between the various parties associated with financial information creation, delivery, and consumption is limited. For example, content producers may maintain mailing lists to the members of which they email their content at intervals. While such mailing list-based systems can be used to distribute content, the content producer has no way to measure the effectiveness of that content in influencing the recipients to deal with the content provider. Similarly, a market participant may be interested in the type of information that a content producer is distributing, but the content producer may not have contact with that market participant and the market participant may not be on the mail list of the content producer, and in fact may not be aware of the mailing list at all, and thus the market participant will not receive the information and the content producer will miss the chance to perform a transaction with the market participant.
To date, there has not been an acceptable and/or viable method or system for making content available and/or for tracking its usage by recipients. Finding distribution channels for new content, discovering new content and sources thereof, and associating delivery of such content with usage is currently achieved, at best, in an ad-hoc manner using disparate tools and systems.
Moreover, present technologies for distributing content may waste computer processing and network resources. For instance, when content is sent to a party that does not desire or require the content, this often results in unneeded network traffic in sending the content to the disinterested party and, often, the disinterested party responding with a request to stop sending the content and/or forwarding the content to another party that may be interested. Further, systems that send such content demand substantial processing resources to generate and send content-bearing messages and manage interactions with receiving parties, including disinterested parties. As the volume of content distribution increases, these technical problems likewise increase.